


If By Chance You're Here Alone

by returntosaturn



Series: Needle [1]
Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-09-13 01:26:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9100411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/returntosaturn/pseuds/returntosaturn
Summary: "It is, in that moment, as if their last meeting had not been so very wrenching, as if she had not written him placating letters, as if they’d merely parted as old friends and gone about their own lives, as it should have been."





	

His mother had insisted he bring a date, and so he asks her. She would usually never insist on such things, but as this is Theseus’s engagement party, he cannot really refuse. It would have been different it was a typical New Year’s ball, or a spring coming-out party for any girl in their wide circle of peers. He has grown accustomed to just following along with their requests; it’s easier than being made out to be a fool in the days prior, or he would admit, sitting alone against the wall waiting for the proper time to hurry off for the stables to visit the Hippogriffs.

And Leta is his friend anyways. It is much preferred that he have her there for comfort than bearing it alone. This way, they can both sneak off later. Perhaps take an evening ride.

He meets her at the foot of the stairs in his own dress robes, black tie and all. She appears in a purple and black bedizened thing that dips a bit too low for a girl of her age, and has more beads sewn into it than the bride’s dress herself.

She offers her gloved hand before he can remember that he is supposed to take it. Still she smiles demurely.

“You…” he stammers. “You look…” Exquisite. “…beautiful.”

She bubbles a laugh. “Newton, you shouldn’t…” she warns teasingly, taking his arm now and leading them to the dining room.

He is relieved that he doesn’t forget to pull her chair for her before seating himself. Relieved that he remembers which fork is what, but when he looks at Leta, she’s holding the wrong soupspoon and just smiles knowingly at him. Gives a little wink.

His father, and his straight-laced Aunt Antonia are watching in well-hidden horror from the length of the table.

The fountains in the garden are glowing with blue light illuminating the water in glittering waves. There’s swaths of ivory drapery that hem them and their guests into the yard. Couples dance, and there’s a tower of bubbling champagne in the corner. A perfect, picturesque party to celebrate the lovely couple. They both seem to glow as they mingle with the crowd and dance through a few numbers with their guests. 

Leta giggles and teases at his arm, under the influence of the wine from dinner, balancing a glass of pink bubbly in her free hand. Typically, he is veritably ignored at these events, but here she is, bright and close and making him to feel as if the entire evening were not so very unbearable. 

He catches his father’s eye from across the sea of dancing couples. He is warning, questioning the effervescent girl with caramel skin who Newt has only spoken of to his mother is letters, but whose family is most unfortunately famous for their scandals.

Leta leans to ask if he’s ever going to dance with her, and he breaks from his father’s gaze only to place his champagne flute at the edge of the column they’re leaning on.

He takes her waist with the air of any blue-blooded wizard, practiced and trained by endlessly dull cotillions. But once she is in his arms, his shoes seem suddenly too big, nipping at her feet in clumsy, too-wide steps.

She laughs against his shoulder and takes the lead.

“Would you…would you like to see the Hippogriffs?” he asks after a song, desperate for some reprieve from the loud din of the party, no matter how close she is swaying now.

“I’d rather take a tour of your house. It’s quite lovely.” Something warm dances in her cacao colored eyes. “It’s my first visit, after all, and I’ve hardly gotten to have a moment alone with you at all.”

He swallows, cheeks warm at the tone of her voice—or the glow of the champagne. “Alright then.”

He hurries her away, through the parlor where the house elves are re-stocking the plates of olives, crackers, and cheese. Through the foyer to the drawing room, where she inspects the painting of his great-grandfather with much interest, before turning and sitting primly on the bench of his mother’s upright piano, pushing open the fall and setting her poised fingers to the keys.

“Perhaps we should…” he begins, warning her that everyone will hear the noise, even above the enchanted quartet of stringed instruments that score the scene in the garden.

But she’s already playing, a tinkling little melody that he doesn’t recognize. He watches the way her gold earrings catch the light, and just now notices the little form of an auguery that is set in stones into her comb that holds her hair off her neck.

He steps closer.

She switches, poking out the tune of the Hogwarts school song, and she tosses a wide grin over her shoulder. She starts to sing, and he laughs, falling to the space next to her on the bench.

“…Bring back what we've forgot,Just do your best, we'll do the rest,And learn until our brains all rot…”

He sings with her, just above a whisper, but smiling just as brightly. The melody dies in a chord that echoes through the room for a few moments after.

The candles in the sconces flicker, setting her skin and eyes in tones of autumn. She faces him now, lashes brushing her cheeks. She leans close, lips catching his in a chaste little kiss like she expects him to follow after.

“Leta…” he whispers, warning.

They should not even be here. They should be in the garden, stealing champagne with a polite distance between them, her in her proper place at helping him to seem less of a thorn in his family’s side.

This is not the first time they have kissed. She’d stolen one by the Black Lake during their fourth year, and again under mistletoe last Christmas. 

But she insists, pressing into him more firmly. He draws back cautiously.

“Show me upstairs,” she says. Its very improper, but the champagne has buzzed his brains into a dizzy swirl, and maybe it would be alright. If they’re quiet…

She peeks into his parent’s bedroom, finding it dark and rather uninteresting. Then Theseus’s abandoned bedroom, nearly bare but for the dark-toned quilt folded over the bed. She pushes open the door and steps fully inside, and he follows.

“We shouldn’t…” he insists. 

But she’s flicking through a small collection of quills on the desk, selecting a pot of purple ink and pocketing beneath the low collar of her dress.

“Please put it back…” he asks feebly. But since when has he thought he could stop her from doing whatever she liked?

“He’s so mean to you, Newton. They all are. I don’t know how you bear it.”

“They aren’t so terrible,” he says. Theseus had rolled his eyes when he’d discovered who his younger brother’s guest would be, and his father had stewed in silent distaste for several hours. His mother had been the only one to bring them both to an unhappy cooperation for the sake of everyone’s nerves.

“I would run away,” she says. Perhaps she is speaking of the environment of her own home now. Her own wishes to dissociate herself and leave behind the home life he knew little of but was certain it was not at all happy.

She grabs his hand, leading him from the room. Across the hall, the door to his own room is already ajar, and she leads them inside still hand in hand.

She goes directly to his bookshelf, running her slender fingers over the spines of anatomy guides and children’s stories all collected there. She picks up the little model of a graphorn he had made of clay when he was ten, considers it and sets it down again.

He is by her side, peering down through the window that overlooks the garden. The party is still in full swing, violins and laughter dulled from this distance. He spots Theseus and his bride, on the edge of the crowd, chatting amicably with people he does not recognize. His parents are nowhere to be found.

“Are you ashamed to have brought me here?” she asks casually.

He looks, and her face is half-lit by the moonlight and the blue, glimmering fountains below.

“Not at all, Leta.” She often asks questions like this these days, and he wonders what for. Why she has to assure herself that she is liked and belongs. As if he has given her any indication that he thinks otherwise. Besides her pickpocketing, even sneaking through the house when they were meant to be outside hasn’t been a terrible offense. 

She steps closer. He feels his head swim with something different than absconded champagne.

She finds his hands, pulls him in. “I see how they look at me. Like I’m air-headed or something. Like I’m…”

She looks down. She swallows. “I’m not.”

He can’t help it. His fingers twine together with hers. “I know you’re not.”

People, particularly girls, say awful things to her at school. He has heard it. But then, he is bullied too. The both of them always have been. He wishes she were better at seeing past it, or some way he could help her to.

Her eyes are back on him again, finding his though they flicker between the open door and the floor. She tilts her head, her eyes flutter shut, and her lips are warm and full against his again.

Her knee nudges his. Her dress rustles.

All over again, he feels like a little boy caught with the horklumps shredded and littered along his rug. 

His eyes spring open when he feels her fingers at the buttons of his robes. His heart hammers madly and he is sure she can feel it. But she doesn’t stop, sliding hands up around his neck to pull him closer.

Something springs afire in him when she huffs against his cheek, hot breath sending a shiver all the way to his toes. 

Damn Father and his conducts, damn Theseus and his gloating happiness.

“You must decide who you are going to be, Newt.” He has heard in every lecture since he was twelve. “You must decide what you are going to make of yourself in this world.”

He reaches, pulling at the bejeweled comb in her hair, rewarded by a cascade of brown curls that smell of rose and honey. Unabashed, he dips his head close, breathing her in. He reaches blindly to set the little hairpiece on his bookshelf.

She finds his face between her palms and pulls him forward, kissing him fully and openly. Again he feels the thrumming bite of disobedience in his chest.

If anyone saw this...If anyone had recognized they'd stolen off up here...

His mind suddenly goes to spring, when the flowers are new and the hippogriffs birth their young. The foals stumble and tinker around at the mother’s feet, but there is always some fox darting through the grass or some bird circling overhead to distract them. And eventually they find that they’ve ventured too far, a meadow’s distance away from their mother. Perhaps he would like that; drifting on his own path until he has made himself into his own man, the sort that never settles to anything or anyone…

His fingers found the long row of buttons at her back, tracing over them curiously like they were each their own little padlock, hiding something mysterious, something new and wild.

"Newt..." she whispers against his chin.

His hand draws back, and she looks pained. Looks suddenly like a frightened doe, her eyes wide and pupils blown to dark full moons.

"I’d like to go back to the party..."

She draws away from him with a whisper of lace and beads. He watches, mesmerized and confused all at once. She pauses at his door, gloved hand resting on the frame. 

Then she smiles. Like he's a lost puppy she happened to find. A happy token forgotten and discovered years later. Then she's gone into the hallway, and he is left feeling ultimately sinful and shameful, an unyielding itch in the pit of his belly.

-

“You mustn’t do that. It’s repulsive.”

“You think I’m repulsive then?” Her shears comes dangerously close to his fingertips.

He just shakes his head. “I never said that…I meant the creatures.”

They’re tending their herbology project in the greenhouse. She has told him of the glumbubbles she’d caught and left floating in Edmund Flint’s pumpkin juice this morning, and how he’d nearly swallowed one before spewing a fount of orange on three other Slytherin boys across the table from him.

Leta has been even more difficult since they returned from their Christmas holidays. She has always been a wild thing, but he finds himself less and less mesmerized by it. She is more and more difficult to talk to, more difficult to understand. Something has changed in him this year, and he can’t quite point it out. Something has turned in her as well. Things have felt immensely different after the night of Theseus’s party.

There is a new game she likes to play at. She has been setting up little traps here and there for those who have ever said a harsh word, and Leta Lestrange’s list of rivals is a long one. He asks her not to; sometimes she hexes the beasts she catches to do what she wants, but this is the first he has heard that she has killed something. Even just a glumbubble. 

“People tease me all the time. The both of us should be used to it by now,” he says, holding up the tender leaves so she can clip out the weeds.

“That’s the problem,” she almost growls. “You see it as teasing. It isn’t. Not for me.”

In that instant, the greenhouse door slides open and three Slytherin girls saunter in, all giggles and gasps.

“Look who we’ve found,” says Martha Yaxley. “So sorry. Have we interrupted your secret snogging spot?”

It’s a jab at both of them, and when Newt turns to glare, they’re all snickering openly. He shuffles closer to Leta, only to focus more intently on the plant before them. 

The shears strike at the empty air with a snap.

“Leta-The-Strange and her little badger. How quaint,” another sniggers. Newt does not know her name. He doesn’t turn, but Leta tenses beside him.

“We’ve heard a rumor,” Martha pipes up again. “We’ve heard that your mother’s living in a squibs’ colony in Africa. Oh, is it true, Leta? We must know.”

It is an old thread of stories he has heard before. That Leta’s mother was a servant in the Lestrange house, a squib and a beautiful dark woman. Leta’s father grew infatuated with her, and Leta was conceived. The woman was banished from the house soon after her birth, left penniless and pleading at the doorstep. Newt expects it is embellished quite a bit after years of circulation, but it is perhaps believable. Leta never speaks of her father or her mother. The only mention of her family he has heard at all is of her aunts and grandmother. For all his consoling he gives, he knows it must be harder for her. Her shortcomings are written directly into her skin for all to see.

He eyes her. Her lips are trembling and she pitches forward slightly like she might be sick.

“Has she written? Oh I’m sure you’d love to go and visit. Perhaps study dung-beetles while you’re there…”

“Leta, dear. You can tell us. Unless you’d not like to embarrass yourself in front of your beau…”

“Is that why your family was nearly cast out this summer? Because they finally realize they can’t hide how your father has disgraced them?”

Before Newt understands what’s happened, Leta has whipped around, a simple garden snake springing from the pocket of her robe, entangling around Martha’s throat.

Her wand is at the ready, and she gives a little turn of her wrist. The snake clings tighter. Martha crumples, struggling, while the other girls screech. 

“Leta!” Newt falls to his knees before the Slytherin girl, his fingers prying at the snake’s silky body, trying to wrench it free.

The entire greenhouse trembles, pots falling and glass cracking. The snake nips him, but he doesn’t stop. Martha has gone blue.

Finally, he feels the snake’s muscles go lax, and tears it easily from the girl’s neck. She hangs limply in his arms, head cradled in the crook of his elbow, unmoving.

“SCAMANDER!” 

It is only now that he looks up, sees the other girls, including Leta, cowering under the tables. He is left with the serpent in hand, hovering over the victim, and Professor Beery is shell-shocked at the doorway.

-

No one is home when he arrives sooty and spinning in the fireplace in the drawing room.

Their ancient house elf, Whort, doesn’t even come to help collect his trunk, not that he would’ve accepted the assistance. He leaves it with a thunk in front of the looming portrait of his great-grandfather.

His bedroom is lit in an unfamiliar stage of daylight, afternoon sun slanting along the floor and the desk. He stands in the middle, listening to the emptiness.

Something on the edge of the shelf glitters and he recognizes it immediately. Her hair comb. 

He shuffles forward, taking the thing in his palm. He squeezes. The teeth poke his hand gratifyingly. 

Perhaps she had been his friend. Perhaps somewhere along the way there had been some inkling of genuineness. Some capacity for reality before it had become clouded with hate and thirst. He hoped. For her sake, he could image it to be true.

He considers the depiction of the Auguery set in colored stones atop the hairpiece. Beautiful, but that is all it is. A representation.

He turns it in his hand, taking it between his fingers.

Snap.

The piece cracks in two easily, and he turns, tossing the remains to the far corner of the bedroom. They bounce off the edge of his wardrobe and clatter anticlimactically to the floorboards.

His eyes sting suddenly and he presses the heels of his hands to them to rub away tears.

He will not...

But against his will, a sob breaks his lips and he's on his knees trying to fit the shattered hair comb back together.

He fumbles for his wand but once he finds it, his hands shake terribly. 

The pieces fall from his hands. His wand clatters hollowly to the floor. He isn't able to draw a breath. 

What will they say? What has he done? Made himself more of a shame to them...

Leta...

He gasps into his hands, tears hot on his cheeks.

"Newt? What's happened?"

His mother's voice is at the door, and then she's there with him, pulling his face to look at her.

"They sent for me straight away. They said you'd been sent home. What's happened?"

But he can do nothing but shake his head, fury and embarrassment and betrayal and ache bubbling his chest, threatening to claw its way out like a...

She holds him close, just until he catches his breath. 

"Come now. Let's have a cup of tea," she says tenderly, standing.

She calls for Whort to put a kettle on, and eventually he follows behind her to the kitchen.

-

“I wish you wouldn’t coddle him, Gerda. He’s not a boy anymore…”

“I’m not coddling him. I haven’t gotten a full sentence out of him since he arrived. It is best for everyone if we just calmed down before…”

His parents break through the heavy kitchen door, his father first.

Newt is at the end of the long table, a cold cup of tea in front of him.

“What is this?” His father asks, red faced and glaring. “Called away from my desk only to hear you’ve been expelled? Do you have any idea…?!”

“Elias…”

He ignores his wife’s half-hearted plea.

“You’ve ruined no one but yourself now, boy. Cry all you’d like now, because you will not be sulking around this house for the next year and a half, mark my words.”

Newt thinks he is finished, for he turns away and sets his shoulders to a straight line.

“It was that girl, wasn’t it? That Lestrange girl…” He spits the surname from his mouth like a hot coal. He turns to his youngest son once more. “Do you not listen, boy? To the things they say about her? Are you so uncaring about our family’s reputation? To associate with and get yourself expelled on behalf of a tramp?!”

Newt leaps up, chair scraping the stone floors.

But he cannot do it. He glowers at this man that has pulled him and called him to be all that he cannot. And here in this moment, at the end of himself, he cannot fight him any longer. He shakes his head, looks away, feels more tears trickle over his already reddened cheeks.

He peals from the house, entangling in a brief struggle with the door to the garden in a fury he cannot unleash, and does not slow until he reaches the stables. He tosses himself around the neck of a Hippogriff, and heaves until the creature licks the salt clean from his cheeks.

-

It is a year later before he returns to the Scamander estate. His mother is a little greyer, a little more faded. He is bundled in a cobalt-colored coat and his tattered House scarf, and yet she suggests they sit on the terrace and have their tea.

The sky is a dull version of Jobberknoll-blue, streaked in mist.

“It is lovely to see you, my sweet boy,” she says, as he pours for them.

He nods, smiling warmly. He has visited her straight from Dumbledore’s office. He has been allowed a day’s trip to Scotland for his N.E.W.T.’s which have been arranged specially for him. Somehow he had come to convince them, with the help of a certain professor, that he should be allowed to complete his coursework in correspondence, a rare case and certainly a privilege never granted to a student suspected of attacking a classmate. He has studied dutifully, in spare moments at his desk at the Ministry, and during lonely nights in his dank London flat. He does not deserve it, he thinks, but he has vowed to himself not to let this chance slip.

He had fudged so many things. He has played the rebel and reaped the results. It is time he does something good. In his own way. As his father has always said.

“I came to tell you something,” he says, setting his spoon aside his saucer. “The War is close.”

This is not what he has meant to say. They all know the War is close. Closer than comfort would allow, shadowing each of their lives in its own sinister way. Theseus has been at the front since the beginning, despite their mother’s protesting, and his wife’s coming child. This is the only thing that is alike about the two brothers: their recklessness.

“Newton…” she sighs, reaching a hand to grasp his. “You’re too gentle for all that. Reconsider.”

“I have,” he says to the sugar crock. “I have thought about it a great deal. They’re using dragons, Mother. In beastly ways.”

He had decided long before his N.E.W.T.’s were even arranged. He just had to finish before he could enlist. He cannot bear sitting in that staunch office day after day while creatures are forced to do the bidding of men who are too unfit to resolve their issues by delegation. War is not something he wants to be a part of, but tending to the wellbeing of these creatures, the world’s last true innocence…

He must.

-

He writes once. Twice. If only to keep himself sane. If only to try and hold onto the vain belief that there is something else in the world besides greed and hate. She doesn’t reply until weeks later. Or perhaps he only gets the letter delivered to him now, recuperating from an injury involving a particular frazzled female Short-Snout.

She writes with the language of a sweetheart writing her soldier. Maybe he imagines it. Her picture is folded between the careful creases of the parchment.

When he returns to England, he sees her in Diagon Alley, giggling on the arm of a slender, dark-haired man.

He ducks quickly into a broomstick shop and pokes around there until the shop owner asks if he’s planning to buy anything or not.

-

“Does Leta Lestrange like to read?”

He doesn’t like the way her voice quivers when she says it.

“Who?”

The ghost of the woman that has haunted him for the past decade, of course. But he finds that during the course of the past three days, he has not thought on her name even once. 

The woman before him grows misty eyed. She is all shades. She is blunt, she is soft. She is everything.

“The girl whose picture you carry?”

He doesn’t know how to say it. He doesn’t know how to assemble into words that he carries it still as a familiar face when jungles and deserts are particularly vast and lonely. He has given up long ago on mending things, or wanting to. And yet still she was the only one so similar to him. Until now.

“I don’t know what Leta likes these days. Because people change. I’ve changed. Maybe a little.”

And in a few words, he has told her the story. This woman, who he’d only just met, who’d pushed into an alley and arrested him on sight. The woman that lights something in him that is entirely different than infatuation. It is warm, it is enduring. It has to be.

-

He sees her just a few weeks later, as he leaves Obscurus Books with a spring to his step and a neatly penned contract stuffed anxiously into his case. He is still on the steps when he catches her eye line. Almost as if it’s fate that he should be looking in this exact direction at this exact moment. Cruel fate anyways.

He pauses, watching.

Her hair is wound up with the grace of a grown woman, but she is no less young and beautiful than he remembers though they are both so much older now. A ring glitters on her left hand, a rather large emerald crusted into it. 

He dodges someone trying to enter the publishing house, and mutter an apology. And as if he she is some beautiful beast turning towards the sudden snap of a twig in the forest, her eyes are on him.

Recognition blossoms, and she grins widely.

He reciprocates.

It is, in that moment, as if their last meeting had not been so very wrenching, as if she had not written him placating letters, as if they’d merely parted as old friends and gone about their own lives, as it should have been.

But it has been very long. There is nothing more that needs to be said, so he nods his greeting and turns in the direction of the Leaky Cauldron.

There are letters to write, things to be celebrated. Creatures to tend. There is more in life than he knew…than he thought in those days. He is glad of it.

**Author's Note:**

> ( tumblr: @allscissorsallpaper )


End file.
